In November 2017, the Universities of Neuchâtel, Zurich and Bern in Switzerland will host the first international conference to focus specifically on visual communication in/about new media. In this regard, we invite the submission of abstracts for scholarly presentations in any of four overlapping thematic areas.

1. Social interaction

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on the communicative uses of visual resources in the context of new media; for example: orthography and typography, graphematic design, the use of emojis (pictograms, emoticons, smilies), and/or the social-interactional uses of video, GIFs and non-moving images.

2. Meta-discourse

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on people’s talk or writing about visual practices; for example: journalistic commentary about visual practices in new media (the use of emojis, for instance) or communicators’ discussions about their own or others’ visual practices in new media spaces.

3. Visual ideologies

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on the visual depiction of new media in, for example, the context of commercial advertising, print or broadcast news, cinema and television narratives and/or public policy and educational settings.

4. Industrial design

Here, we envisage presentations that focus on perspectives related to, for example, the visual-material design of technologies and apps, as well as the look or layout of screen interfaces, especially insofar as they concern the communicative (as opposed to technical) affordances of new media.

In selecting presentations, the conference team will privilege those adopting a multimodal approach to visual communication; in other words, studies that focus on visuality but attend to its interaction with other communicative modes – especially linguistic ones. We take a broad and critical approach to labels like “new”, “digital” and “mobile” as they are applied to communication technologies; we are nonetheless principally interested in more current, social, interactive media spaces such as micro-blogging, messaging, forums, gaming, video- and photo-sharing, and social networking.

The principal language of the conference will be English; however, the conference team welcome presentations and posters presented in German, French, and Italian (ideally, with slides or handouts offered in English). In such an interdisciplinary field, we also invite presenters to use their preferred style of delivery, whether it’s a read paper, an unscripted slideshow or some combination of the two.

Titles, abstracts and basic biographical information should be submitted using our online submission system available here: https://www.conftool.net/vinm2017/ . Abstracts should be between 300 and 500 words and written in the same language as the presentation or poster. If the abstract is in a language other than English, please provide a list of five keywords in English. We ask that you also indicate which of our four thematic areas (above) your paper addresses as well as if it is a presentation or a poster. The deadline for proposals is February 28^th 2017 with an anticipated decision date of April 30^th 2017.